John Krafcik started out at GM, spent over a decade at Ford, and
then moved over to Hyundai at a time when the South Korean car
maker was revamping its image in the US. More recently, he was
president of TrueCar, a website that provides consumers with
buying guidance.

Krafick is the most high-profile hire Silicon Valley has made so
far in the push to create a driverless car. It's also the
clearest sign we've yet received that Google is doing more than
fooling around with podmobiles that can operate without human
control — Google is building a real car.

Krafcik's hire also trumps, in impressive fashion,
Apple's recent hire of Doug Betts, a former quality czar at
Chrysler. Betts' hire was interpreted by many as a indication
that Apple's so-called "Project Titan" was more than simply an
effort to expand the company's involvement with the burgeoning
tech side of cars — it was a signal that Cupertino was
serious, and the Apple Car was on the horizon.

However, Betts left
Chrysler last yearafter the automaker was
clobbered by Consumer Reports, with numerous Chrysler, Dodge, and
Jeep vehicles finishing well down the publication's reliability
list. At the time, Betts said he was pursuing
other interests, but the speculation was that Fiat
Chrysler's Fiat 500, relatively newly arrived in the US, got such
poor reliability ratings from Consumer Reports that Fiat
Chrysler boss Sergio Marchionne was calling for a head.

The car of the future

So Apple's big-name industry hire looked awkward to anyone
following the actual car business. Betts is respected, but
Krafcik brings skills to Google that anyone building the car of
the future would want to have. Nearly his entire career
has been committed to building the car of the future, long before
Google or Apple got into the game.

He's a leading exponent of what's known as "lean manufacturing,"
a production system closely identified with Toyota. The basic
idea is that you don't pile up inventories of components at
assembly facilities to build cars. Rather, you optimize your
supply chain so that vehicles are manufactured "just in time,"
more efficiently and profitably, with production driven by
demand.

Krafcik learned about this system in his first auto-industry job,
at a plant in Fremont, CA that GM and Toyota set up jointly so
that GM could get a crash course in the "Toyota Way." It was
called "New United Motor Manufacturing," but in the mid-1980s
everyone called it NUMMI — and we now know it as the Tesla
Factory, where Elon Musk and company are building their car of
the future.

They
used to build Toyotas here.REUTERS/Noah Berger

The Toyota Way

Krafcik worked with a Toyota Way expert, Yoshimitsu
Ogihara, and he credits the Japanese
engineer for showing him the light, in a subtle
manner.

"This was 1984, and no one really knew at the time that there was
this big, huge difference between the way one company built cars
and another company built cars,"
Krafcik told MLive in an interview in 2012. "And I was a
23-year-old kid and I suddenly knew. So I worked there another
couple years under Ogihara-san. He taught me so much but never
through saying it."

Lean manufacturing has become the dominant modern technique for
building cars. Krafcik enhanced his credibility with this radical
new approach by spending a few years at MIT to further his study
of lean alongside James Womack, an academic closely identified
with the manufacturing process who went on to start the Lean
Enterprise Institute.

"He has a lot of bandwidth," Womack said, adding that "this is
the man for the job" when asked how Krafcik would handle
the management of the Google Car. "He's not wedded to
the past, he floats very freely over the landscape, he connects
the dots."

John
Krafcik, the new head of Google Auto.AP

After his time at Ford, Krafcik brought his expertise to Hyundai,
revamping its presence in the US and taking the automaker to a
position where it was competing with Japanese rivals and the
Detroit Big Three.

The bottom line is that this guy can build cars and sell
cars. He's spent over 30 years doing it, so it's not unreasonable
to assume that putting Krafcik in charge of the Google Car and
reassigning Chris Umson, who has been guiding the project,
to a more technical role, means that Google is ready to take
"Google
Auto" to the next level.

Building a real car

Google is
already a car company. When it moved its driverless car from
the prototype stage to the production stage, it became a company
that was assembling vehicles (even if it outsourced the
work).

So does the Krafcik hire mean that Google is going to both build
and sell cars?

Womack confessed no inside knowledge, but he did ask whether the
auto industry is really about autos. In fact, he noted that
Krafcik is particularly good at "mind meld of ecosystems," which
in the case of the Google Car could involve everything from
vehicles to infrastructure to insurance.

At the moment, the focus is on autonomous driving. "They’d like
to get there first with the best autonomy," Womack said of
Google's efforts.

The future of transportation could involve a lot more than that.
But for the moment, Google has committed to a much more robust
development of the Google Car — and has sent a strong signal to
both the traditional auto industry and Silicon Valley rivals that
the project has moved far beyond being a science project.